


Beekeeper

by apparitionism



Category: Warehouse 13
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Beekeeping AU, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-28
Updated: 2017-06-24
Packaged: 2018-10-25 00:34:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 18,178
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10753023
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apparitionism/pseuds/apparitionism
Summary: All I can tell you is that there once was a moody beekeeper. She tended her hives; she kept to herself. Until she came to find that bees, despite their frank and matchless industry, can also be quite troublesome...





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This story came about because of some joking on Twitter about Joanne Kelly playing a moody beekeeper in that Runoff movie. And then deathtodickens was going to draw that moody-beekeeper-JK, and I begged her to add JM as a troublesome bee, which [she did](http://deathtodickens.com/post/125880942995/i-should-be-writing-but-instead-im-feeding-the). And The Moody Beekeeper and the Troublesome Bee sounded like a fairy tale to me, but then I read a lot about apiculture, and I didn’t entirely stick to the idea but maybe a little, so here’s how it starts, and it’ll go where it’s going, with some talking and meandering.

“Stupid bees!” says the orchardist, swatting at his neck.

“You didn’t cover your collar,” the beekeeper says moodily. “Quit making sudden movements, and don’t hurt my bees. Without them, you won’t get any apples.”

“Yeah, yeah, but without my trees, that’s a lot less pollen for their little bee business, so tell them to quit hatin’ on me!… and get out of my shirt!”

The beekeeper sighs. They have this conversation every spring, because every winter, the orchardist forgets everything he has ever been told about the bees. Or perhaps he never listens when she tells him in the first place; that is the more likely explanation. “They aren’t hating; they’re curious. Though why they’re curious about _you_ , I don’t know.”

“Right? C’mon, bees, _she’s_ the mysterious one, not _me_.”

She lifts her smoker and approaches the first hive. She sends a light puff at the hive entrance, then pries the lid off. Smoke again, then cover and wait; she waits not too long, then lifts the lid once again. This is a short visit, a brief peek today, this very early spring day, just to establish that everything looks right. She’ll take a much closer look next week, and then again the next, to ensure that all will be well when the nectar begins to flow. The bees she sees now are wandering from the smoke in slight confusion, but nothing seems amiss. “I’m not mysterious at all,” the beekeeper maintains. “They know everything about me.”

“I bet they don’t.”

“There’s nothing new to know, anyway. Nothing to tell.”

On one of her first real visits to the hives—she had been six, wearing an old hand-me-down veil of her mother’s, a veil that fit her as if she were an exceptionally modest bride, covering her entire dress—her mother had examined and adjusted the hives, assessed and tweaked, as was her responsibility, for the hives were hers (and had been her mother’s before her). Then her mother had turned to her, the little girl who would one day tend those hives, finally herself a beekeeper, and said, “Tell the bees.”

“Tell them what?” she had asked. What would one tell bees?

“Who you are. Why you’re here. What’s happened to you. Bees are curious; bees want to know.”

She had crouched down, next to a hive. “Hello bees,” she had said, feeling silly. “I’m the beekeeper’s daughter. I’m here because… I’m going to be a beekeeper someday too. And today I rode my bike to the orchard where my friend lives. There aren’t any flowers there yet though. In case you were wondering.”

“That’s very good,” her mother said, low and happy. “They love hearing about flowers. But never forget to tell them about yourself. They want to know who’s taking care of them.”

“Do you tell them?”

“Of course I do. About me, about your father… and I’ve been telling them about you since you were born.”

The hardest day of the beekeeper’s life had come two decades later, in midwinter, when she had to trudge through snow to the hives, had to crouch down and knock to ensure the hives still hummed, then sit down, heedless of the cold, and tell the bees that her mother would no longer come, that her mother would no longer be their beekeeper, that her mother would no longer tell them. “But I will,” the beekeeper said, because her mother had told her: the bees need to know they will be taken care of. If the bees are worried, if they fear for their future, then the queen will not lay eggs, the drones will not fly, the workers will neither groom nor guard nor fan nor cap nor undertake, and the honey will not flow. So the beekeeper sat in the snow, melting it with her tears… comforting the bees as no one could comfort her.

But today, she sees: she has not told the bees, not in some time. Because, she thinks, she has done nothing about which they need to know. Nothing. Nothing at all. “There’s nothing to tell,” she says to the orchardist firmly. “Nothing.”

“Oh yeah? I’m pretty sure you went and visited the ci-ty,” he sing-songs at her.

“Nothing happened in the city… well, I did buy a new veil, so nobody’s tempted to try to get inside my collar.” She’d needed a new veil; that was the truth. Her usual one had developed a hole that, before she realized it was there, had proved too inviting: she’d realized there were bees in her hair, working their way through her curls, climbing to her scalp… only with a great exercise of self-control had she managed to walk slowly from the hives, remove the veil, and wait for the nosy explorers to decide that they had mapped out enough new territory.

“Hey bees!” the orchardist now says. “Keep trying! Eventually she’ll open up! Maybe, for you, anyway. She’s always liked you better than she likes me.”

The beekeeper lifts the top cover, then the inner cover, from the second hive. A brief stream of smoke, and the bees retreat. She waits, wondering if they send out, in response, pheromones that signify grumbling discontent. As she waits, she says, “I do not need to open up. And I like you fine, but you don’t have to be here, you know. You could go somewhere else, and the bees wouldn’t bother you. Don’t you have an orchard to tend?”

“I’d rather stand around and bug you than stand around and wonder when the blooms might pop. I guess I could think about the weather.”

“The weather’s fine,” she says.

“Today,” he shrugs, with a hint of warning.

She concedes the point with a nod. He’s always very serious about, and sensitive to, the weather; he can feel cold coming sooner than others can. He knows when to, and when not to, wet the trees to keep the frost from forming. His family has always known these things, and they’ve always kept orchards. Just as the beekeeper’s family has always kept bees.

She works her way through the remaining hives. The orchardist watches her and complains about bees in his sleeves. “Bother her,” he keeps telling them. “Trust me, she loves it.”

“Please stop giving them ideas,” the beekeeper eventually says as she replaces the final telescoping cover.

“I’ll stop if you’re done. Are you done?”

“I’m done,” she affirms. She closes the smoker to kill it; she attaches it to her belt.

As they begin the trudge back to the beekeeper’s small house, the orchardist chatters about bees and trees and the sky and food and television and everything else that pulls at his magpie attention. The beekeeper listens to him with one ear and little thought—he is far less sensical than the still-present hum of the hive—but then there is a stumble in that hum, and the beekeeper stops. She turns around, expecting only the familiar sight of the faded white hive boxes, but then the stumble reaches her eyes; she sees, for the briefest of moments, a figure near the hives, a figure that might be a person, but a shadowy, undeveloped image of a person. The beekeeper blinks, and the dark blur is gone.

“’S’matter?” the orchardist asks, when he realizes he has left her behind. He walks back to her and squints in the hives’ direction. “What is it?”

The beekeeper shakes her head. The hives sound right again, and her vision is clear. “Nothing,” she says.

TBC

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> original (slightly modified) Tumblr tags: I hope it's clear who's who, the genre this has sort of ended up as is one in which I'm not entirely comfortable, but we'll see how it goes, incidentally (first), 'telling the bees' is of course a real thing, at least it once was, I read that and was like 'I know what this is about now', incidentally (second), I will say because of not wanting to be a hypocrite that I thought Runoff wasn't very good, and I'll say also that the bee situation was entirely wasted, particularly given what I now know about bees and the keeping thereof


	2. Chapter 2

When the beekeeper returns to the hives the following week, she is blessedly alone; no orchardist is making noise at her or at the bees. She can observe and count and assess to her heart’s content. She can let the hum and buzz pervade and fill her ears as vibration only, her eardrums not taking the trouble to transmit further, to translate into sound.

Over the winter, the bees climb higher in the hive, and so the top deep is replete: upwards of fifty pounds of frames and comb and honey and bees. But the beekeeper keeps herself strong. She lifts the full deep, sets it on the ground, removes the bottom deep from the hive base. Now the full deep takes its place. The nearly empty one she will place on top, and then a new, empty honey super on top of that.

The bees will work their way up again, filling each comb cell with brood or pollen or nectar, up through the hive until they reach that top super; the nectar they deposit into the cells of its frames will become the honey the beekeeper will harvest in late summer, while the nectar that becomes honey in the hive body will keep the bees alive during the winter.

They eat that body honey, cell by cell, from periphery to center, from bottom to top, shivering together in a cluster to keep warm. When the weather begins to change, the bees resist losing this close companionship. They squirm against and around each other, even when staggered with puffs from the smoker; the beekeeper is sure their intention is not to make her inspection more difficult, but they do effectively—often very effectively—hide the prize she seeks.

“Can you find the queen?” her mother would ask, each spring, when they worked in just this way. They would scrutinize the frames on which the bees were gathered; they would vie to see who would be first to distinguish the long, slender monarch of the hive from among thousands and thousands of stocky bodies. The beekeeper developed a knack for spotting her, and that became her job, while her mother estimated brood numbers, checked for mites, inspected wax cappings new and old.

The beekeeper now sees, as she peers into the deep, that this hive is preparing for a change in governance: queen cells, larger than normal brood, protrude from the comb on some of its frames. She had asked her mother about these cells, long ago, and her mother had said, “Supersedure.”

“Super-see-what?” She said it like her friend from the orchard would have, and she laughed.

“Supersedure. The workers sense that the queen is weakening, so they begin raising new queens. One will take the old queen’s place.”

“What happens to the old queen?”

“The workers kill her.”

The unembroidered statement had brought the beekeeper up short. “Why?”

“No more use for her,” her mother said.

And the beekeeper, though young, was old enough to be of two minds about this state of affairs: sad for the old queen, sad even for the new queen, who would eventually become old and herself be superseded, and so on as the line of regal discards grew… but appreciative as well, for the pragmatic politics of the hive, the lack of sentimentality with which the bees went about their business. A good lesson in doing what must be done.

Now the beekeeper gentles the full deep with a puff of smoke and extracts from it the first bee-covered frame. Before she can begin her close assessment, however, she feels something behind her; she turns around. Her eyes… her vision blurs as when she was last at the hives… but this time the distortion doesn’t disappear when she blinks. It coalesces: a woman stands not three yards from the beekeeper, far closer to her, and to the hives, than even the foolish orchardist habitually positions himself.

The woman is a mystery, despite standing in the bright April sun—or she is made of the light of that sun and the slanting shadows it casts. Her face is pale, marked with burnt umber eyes, framed by long hair so dark the beekeeper can imagine no light escaping it; and her clothing is some bedouin swathe of sloe-black gossamer drape and the lightest of creamy crepe. It might be new, or it might be very old. An ambiguity furs the air around her.

She has a richness to her, a bearing and mien that puts the beekeeper somewhat in mind of those successful people who come to this small town, the ones who have elsewhere achieved whatever they thought they wanted. The ones who have reached goals, been rewarded for that, and then realized that they had been only partially right. The beekeeper tries not to sneer at them, but then they say too-earnest words about _authenticity_. About _reality_. The orchardist grins and charms the women among them into spending time with him; “my family’s been here forever,” he tells them, saying words about his mother and father and grandmothers and grandfathers and the fruit they grow, and the women _thrill_ to his tenure in this _genuine_ place, the _realness_ of him, how wonderful it is to live so close to _nature_. The beekeeper swallows bile at the thought of speaking about her family, about her mother, gone ten years now, about her father, who every day seems a little nearer to being gone.

She swallows, now, at the thought of the orchardist charming this woman.

“Beekeeper,” the woman says. A simple hail? Or is it an accusation?

Her voice is rich, too, as she uses it again: “Or do you prefer ‘apiarist’?”

How could this woman have known to come here? The hives live not so far from the beekeeper’s house, but they sit in a clearing within a copse, to prevent their being stumbled upon. And the beekeeper knows that everyone who knows how to send anyone to this place knows well enough _not_ to send anyone to this place. Not anymore.

How long ago now? Two years? No, three… the time hazes as it passes…three years ago, a woman from the city had wanted to learn to keep bees, and the orchardist, hoping to gain her favor, had seen no harm in showing her the way to the hives. The way to the hives, and the way to the beekeeper, who in the depths of that winter had had to move her father into an assisted living facility… a place that used to be called simply “the home,” but why had it ever been called that? Her father no longer knew anything of home. He had begun to ask the beekeeper “who are you” whenever he would come upon her in the small house their family had shared. “I live here,” the beekeeper would answer.

“You live here. Do I?” her father would ask, and then came the day, and then more days, that he no longer believed the beekeeper when she told him “yes.”

She told the bees. This time, despite the cold, her tears melted nothing: no snow softened the dead, flat ground.

But then in the spring that followed, as if part of the nectar flow, the woman from the city had come, and she wanted to learn to keep bees.

Now, in this spring, this dark woman cannot want to keep bees: she wears no gear. The dilettantes display their bright-white hats, their veils, their gloves like so much plumage. This woman is uncovered, and the bees should be curious, should be finding folds in dusky fabric, crawling into neck and sleeves and hair and everywhere, wondering, questing. But the bees do not seem to want to know. The beekeeper, now, surprises herself: she does want to know. She asks “who are you.”

“No one in particular,” the dark woman says, and now her voice is low… flowing… the beekeeper shakes her head. Spring is the season, and the only flow that matters is the nectar. Not a voice.

“No one in particular,” the beekeeper echoes. The words prickle up her throat, through her lips. “All right, no one in particular. How did you get here?”

“I learned the way,” says the woman. She smiles, her teeth another bright flash, this within a shadowed mouth.

“What do you want?” the beekeeper asks, so she can reject the request, so this strange woman will not linger near her hives.

The woman does not answer. She turns, a swirl of hair and soft sheeting, and begins to walk away, moving in the wrong direction, not toward the house and the road and the town.

“What do you want?” the beekeeper repeats. An impatient murmur rises from the frame she still holds, and she glances down at it. When she looks up again, the woman is gone. Such fast movement would have been required, to move so far away as to no longer be seen, that it should have alarmed the bees—but they are unperturbed. Still in their smoky daze? Yes, that must be it.

The beekeeper closes her eyes and shakes her head once more, to drive this happening out of her head, taking care not to let the movement travel down her arms and jostle the frame. She opens her eyes again and returns to work. But she cannot help herself; one more time, she whispers, “What do you want?”

And only because she is concentrating so closely on the hives, only because of that, because that could be the only reason: part of the hum from those hives shears off and finds its way to a place just behind her ear, where it resolves into a low, rich voice. That voice says, “To know.”

TBC

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> slightly edited part 2 tumblr tags, which will make sort of clear when this part was originally written, and which I include just to remind myself: at DragonCon I said to JK the following, 'you make a really good beekeeper', and I couldn't help laughing, because it was of course in the context of speaking about Runoff, but I was of course really talking about this instead, and feeling somewhat guilty and silly about it, but also strangely good, because let me assure you, I would put her in better jeans


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lots of research on bees and their keeping has gone into this thing. One book I found nicely synoptic is Ashley English’s _Keeping Bees_ ; it’s hugely informative and well-written, and its illustrations and photos are great to look at. Anyone with an interest in bees could do far worse than starting there. (I don’t know her or anything. It’s just pleasant to find a text that really meets your needs, particularly when, as you’re looking at a pile of books, you aren’t quite sure what those needs are.) I mean I am never going to keep bees myself, what with that entailing some kind of actual interaction with nature. But more power to those who do, including our beleaguered beekeeper.

The beekeeper does not have expectations. She does not have hopes. Not anymore. She has tasks; she has responsibilities. No dreams. No wishes.

But lately when she walks the path to the hives, she walks with the breaking of the day, well in advance of when she will begin any inspections. She walks, and she waits—across the clearing, so her presence will not disturb the bees. She waits, and she watches.

However industrious bees may be, they are not early risers: they avoid the day until they are certain it has shed the chill of night. Not until hours after sunrise do the first foragers emerge. But emerge they must, for nectar and pollen are in the world now for the taking; the apple blossoms, in particular, have begun to open. The beekeeper presumes that is where the now-warm, now-energetic workers are headed. They have always been exceptionally bloom loyal, the bees from her hives, and the honey from the nectar they collect is steady in its taste from year to year.

Do they even need to dance for each other the directions to the orchard? Surely its location now is inborn… or perhaps the knowledge is stored in the comb cells where the queen lays the eggs, and as eggs become larvae become pupae, they absorb its significance, so that when they break free of the cells, they feel that they have always known the way. Just as the temperament to tend bees seems to have beat from birth in the beekeeper’s own blood.

She watches the bees set to their industry, and she chides herself for continuing to waste time on this waiting. She lights the kindling in the smoker and blows the bellows, then lets it burn down to a smolder; she pulls on her gloves and her hat, zipping the veil’s edge to her jacket. Thus sealed, she checks the smoke—white, a strong plume bearing no dangerous sparks—and sets to her work.

Nearly an hour later, one hive is complete, and she is warming, sheathed as she is in her gear. As she opens the second hive and hefts its first frame, a bead of sweat drips from her hairline into the corner of her right eye. She blinks, but it remains; she shakes her head and pushes her shoulder at her veil, as high as she can, to try to help it on its way.

As if that shoulder had lifted a telephone receiver to her ear, she hears a lilt: “Beekeeper.”

The beekeeper does not turn her head. “Stranger,” she acknowledges.

“Than what?”

Now she does turn, uncomprehending; and there is the dark woman, head and hands uncovered as before, careless of the airborne workers. They, just as careless, bypass her. “What?” the beekeeper asks.

“‘Stranger,’ you said. Stranger than what?”

The beekeeper shrugs as well as she can with a frame in her hands. “Fiction, I guess? But that would make you truth.”

“Oh, I like that,” says the woman. The lilt is still in her voice; she is more playful, this time, than mysterious.

“You seem like the sort who would,” the beekeeper says. She doesn’t know what she means, even as she says it, but her having said it earns her a vague pout—but is it vague because the woman’s face still bears some intrinsic blur, or because the beekeeper can’t see as clearly as she might, through her veil? She forgets so easily, when she works, that she is veiled, that her closeup view of the hives is never completely clear. Slightly gray, slightly enmeshed: that is how they look, here in the clearing, when she is close to them.

Looking at anything through the veil requires compensation. The beekeeper compensates automatically, accepting some of what she sees, rejecting some, adjusting the rest.

“Can I look at you?” the beekeeper asks the dark woman. Because what if she is some artifact of overcompensation, some animation that the beekeeper has gathered to play, as a movie, on the inside of her veil?

The pout becomes a smile. “Of course,” says a warmer voice.

The beekeeper slides the frame back into the deep; it can wait a moment. She beckons for the woman to follow her, then walks some distance from the hives. She takes off her gloves, but she hesitates for a moment at the closure of the veil.

The woman says, from behind the beekeeper, “You need not fear that I will disappear.”

“Don’t read my mind,” the beekeeper says. “Besides, you disappeared before.” But the beekeeper unzips the veil and turns around. And there the woman stands, her edges more clearly defined, her eyes and hair contrasting more dramatically with the pale of her skin. Paradoxically, her clothing is an even more indistinct mass of folds and layers, and the beekeeper can’t understand how the bees resist that swirling mystery. She blurts, “Why aren’t the bees interested in you?”

The woman smiles and lifts a dark eyebrow. “Aren’t they?”

“They pass you by,” the beekeeper says. “Bees don’t pass anything by. You could be a flower; you could be hiding something they want.”

“Come now, beekeeper, do you imagine I smell like a flower?”

The beekeeper is not going to imagine what this woman smells like. She turns her head to the side, to lessen the chance that she might find out. “I don’t know,” she says.

“In any case, they must know that I hide nothing they seek.” The woman looks the beekeeper up and down. She gestures at the beekeeper’s hands, gripping the hat and veil. “You must think _you_ hide something they seek. You in your heavy veil, all your coverings that keep them at bay: you are the one who seeks to hide.”

“I just don’t want to get stung. I would think you’d be concerned too.”

“You would think wrongly.”

Think wrongly. This makes the beekeeper shake her head, to dislodge any thoughts such a statement might call to mind. “I would,” she says, harsh and bitter, “I would think wrongly.” The dark woman’s eyebrow now slants down, signaling disapproval. The beekeeper shakes her head again, for this is exactly the judgmental stance she works diligently to keep from bringing to bear on herself. How much does this dark woman know? “Am I hallucinating?”

“How would I know?”

“I… guess you wouldn’t,” the beekeeper says.

“No. So you must tell me.”

“Whether I’m hallucinating?”

“If you like.”

The beekeeper sighs. “Okay, let’s say you’re a hallucination.”

“Or, as established, truth,” the woman says. Pouting again, but this time also playful.

Now she reminds the beekeeper a bit of the orchardist. “I have to get back to work. You can stay if you want. Obviously the bees don’t mind.”

“And if they don’t mind, you don’t?”

“What I think doesn’t seem to matter much.”

“Oh, beekeeper.” Petulant.

But the dark woman does not disappear, so the beekeeper, somewhat self-consciously, reattaches her veil, dons her gloves once again, and sets to work.

She has completed her examination of two more hives—not forgetting the woman’s presence, but setting it to the side, working through it—when, as she opens the fourth hive, she hears the voice in her ear again. “I feel a vibration,” the woman says, and she must be very close; if not for the veil, her mouth would surely be at the beekeeper’s ear. “I feel a vibration,” she repeats. “You are humming, continually humming. What are you humming?”

“I’m not humming.”

“There is a rhythm,” the woman insists. “Are you counting?”

“No.”

“Are you humming _and_ counting?”

“No! I’m…” What is the right word? “Reciting.”

“What are you reciting?”

“Just a mnemonic.”

“But what is the content of this mnemonic?”

The beekeeper could lie, but—well, she is veiled. She reminds herself, assures herself, that the woman cannot see the bloom of her blush, not through the mesh, as she answers, “The scientific classification of honeybees.”

“And what does the scientific classification of honeybees aid you in remembering?”

“To check all of every frame. Somehow, saying it helps me keep my eyes moving. It’s easy to get lost. To not really look at it all.”

“You hum and count to find your way through the comb. What a difficult journey it must be for you.” As if charmed beyond measure.

“It isn’t a difficult journey, I’m not finding my way, and I don’t hum!”

In response, the dark woman says, again, “Oh, beekeeper”… and the beekeeper is today becoming far too familiar with this wounded note in her voice. The beekeeper sighs. She grasps the first frame and, as she does, glances slowly to the side, to see if the woman is as close as her voice has made her seem. She is not—but at least she has not disappeared. “Animalia,” the beekeeper says. She articulates it clearly, louder than she would, for the dark woman’s benefit, then repeats it as she casts her eyes over each cell, each cell in turn, following the pattern, the rows. “Animalia animalia animalia.” She moves on: “Arthropoda,” she says, again loudly, then, “Arthropoda. Arthropoda. Arthropoda.” At some point in her progress, she sets the thought of the woman aside again and speaks only to the few bees that remain on the frame, adds to each term a shade of apology for having attempted to smoke them away. “Insecta.” She counts, casts her eyes back and forth. “Pterygota.” Then “Neoptera.” Now “Hymenoptera.” Apocrita. Apidae. Apinae. Apini. Apis. “Apis mellifera,” the beekeeper murmurs in closing, as she replaces the frame.

Impossibly close to her ear, now, again, she hears, “It is a prayer.”

The beekeeper begins to protest, “Of course it isn’t a prayer.” But the words stick in her throat.

“What a delightful surprise, that you are humming a prayer. To whom do you pray?”

“I’m not praying.” This, she can say. It might be a prayer, but she is not praying.

“You are.”

“Even if I were, I wouldn’t know who, whom, I was praying to.”

“Perhaps it doesn’t matter,” the woman says. “Animalia. Arthropoda. Insecta, pterygota, and so on, unto the honey-bearing bee. Perhaps the prayer alone is sufficient… perhaps _this_ prayer alone is sufficient.”

How long has it been since ears other than the ones that hide behind this dark woman’s dark hair have heard the beekeeper utter this prayer? The beekeeper asks herself the question, although she knows the answer perfectly well: exactly as long as it has been since the woman from the city came to these hives.

That woman wasn’t dark at all. The beekeeper remembers having murmured her prayer—and now she cannot think it otherwise—even more quietly than usual, and remembers that that woman asked, “Did you say something?”

“Nothing important,” the beekeeper had said, embarrassed to reveal more. She told herself that she was more concerned with explaining and demonstrating the proper way to inspect the frames, so she raised her voice to say: “You count brood, you check cappings, you see the patterns… and you know your queen is healthy when you see that all of that is as it should be.” She would explain next time, she had decided, about the proper angle at which to hold the frame to make the sun illuminate it just right, to glint in that magic way that would reveal the contents of each cell. Next time, she had thought, and felt a surge of a wildly unfamiliar anticipation.

Now, in front of this woman, the beekeeper bows her head in shame. She says, “It isn’t sufficient.”

TBC

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> original part 3 tumblr tags: oh my sweet and moody beekeeper, I am about to mess you up but good, or rather to keep leading up to showing how messed up you already are, (I haven't done much with this particular kind of messed up so we'll see if I can pull it off), with regard to the scientific classification situation, I'm not Catholic or Muslim or Jewish or Buddhist, or anything really, but ritual utterances really get my blood moving, particularly if they are incantatory, and who's to say what your ritual utterance should be, or what you should chant (or hum or count) about


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here’s a factoid for you: bees have open circulatory systems. They have hearts but no veins or arteries through which their blood/lymph combination flows; that stuff just kind of disperses throughout their little bodies. Which in this context is not super-important, but it made me think about the extent to which we humans base a bunch of our default figurative language on how our own bodies work—I mean, of course we do—and how stepping to the side of that is a little disorienting. (“Shut up about figurative language already and get to the banging!” No, not quite yet.)

When the beekeeper looks up, the dark woman is gone again.

She should unzip her veil and wipe her brow in relief, should then reattach it with purpose, shake the bees in sugar to check for mites, and be on her way.

But she stands still, wondering when the figure in front of her was replaced by air, wondering if any ears heard her confession of insufficiency. It wasn’t much of an admission… perhaps that’s why the woman disappeared, because she was displeased with the beekeeper’s effort. It seems like something this woman would do.

The beekeeper decides not to think about it. Any of it. She forgets the words she might have been about to utter, had she raised her head and met those dark eyes again. She does unzip her veil, but only in order to direct the smoker at her own eyes once, lightly, to make them redden and tear, to wash away any remembered sights.

The soft, cradling “oh, beekeeper” that ghosts around her is—she tells herself she knows for certain this time—utterly imaginary.

****

“This is a really small town,” the woman from the city had said.

They had just become acquainted, the beekeeper and the woman from the city, and the beekeeper was allowing the woman to observe as she occupied herself with a close examination of the entrances to the hives. Was that just dirt, or were those scratches? She removed one glove so she could touch the wood itself; yes, scratches, and she could feel splinters introducing themselves into her fingers. The scratches were the work of skunks, most likely: they had sharp teeth and sharper claws. They would tooth-and-claw scrabble up onto their hind legs to reach the entrance, up and very nearly into the hive, to make meals of the bees; unaffected by bee venom, they shrugged off stings, happy to eat the workers whose job it was to give their lives for their home… “Small town,” the beekeeper echoed absently. “Always has been.”

“Is that a problem?”

“Why would it be a problem?” The beekeeper looked at her hand, flexed it. The splinters had a palpable presence, as she moved, but they weren’t visible through the veil.

“Socially?”

The beekeeper put her glove back on. The splinters would have to wait. She looked back, over her shoulder, at the woman. Two veils between them: reading a facial expression was nearly impossible. “I’m not social.”

“Maybe you should… get out more,” the woman told her.

“I don’t want to.” The bees did seem a bit agitated, louder than normal, so yes, skunks, and possibly opossums too. Nail-studded boards for addressing this sort of problem were even now leaning against the walls of her shed, waiting. She would need to lay a board, points up, on the ground in front of each hive’s entrance; she did regret the pain those nails would cause to unsuspecting paws, but…

“Maybe you need to.”

For a second, the beekeeper thought the woman was talking about her need to feel guilt, guilt over those paws, so she answered, “I probably do.” Then she realized: “No. Get out more? No, I don’t need to.”

In the days that followed, the beekeeper found blood on the nails, on the planks. She washed the boards and set them back out. After several days of that, she saw no more blood, and she knew the bees were being left alone, safe once again.

“It seems cruel,” said the woman from the city when she saw the metal spikes, when the beekeeper explained their purpose. “They can’t help what they want.”

The clean, galvanized points stood sharp, proud. “They can’t have what they want,” the beekeeper said.

****

“So what’s up?” says the orchardist. He and the beekeeper are standing between two rows of apple trees, looking up, around, everywhere at the whitened blossoms, at the dark bees plundering and pollinating the blooms. At this time of year, the orchard’s atmosphere seems made of unatomized perfume, bottled and heady, and the beekeeper wonders how the bees, with their great sensitivity to even the tiniest molecules of scent, do not swoon from the intensity of the sweetened air.

The beekeeper asks, “Do I seem normal to you?”

“Is that a trick question?”

“Maybe. I think the light’s been playing tricks on my eyes. And my ears.”

“Is _that_ the trick question? How does light play tricks on your ears?”

“Can you answer it?” Because if he could answer it, then she’d have an answer. And she’ll admit it, here in her own head: she’d like to have an answer.

“Uh… by shining really loud? This is a weird riddle.”

“That’s completely true.”

“Can you tell me what you’re talking about?”

“I just keep thinking about something. Or someone. And it’s tricky.”

He doesn’t respond, and she sees that he’s staring at a bee who’s landed on his arm, apparently under the misapprehension that his wrist smells as sweet as his orchard. The beekeeper reaches over and nudges the bee with a fingertip. The worker at first vibrates her thorax and buzzes a refusal to give up, but the beekeeper pushes again, gently. The noise stops, and she launches herself away. The orchardist says, with a relieved exhale, “Whoo, holding still for that. Talk about tricky.”

“She didn’t want to hurt you. Why do you always think they’re out to get you?”

“Why is it tricky for you to think about someone?” he counters. “Do I know them?”

“At first I thought you might. But now… maybe no one knows them.”

“Except you?”

“Definitely not me. It’s… a stranger.”

“But you want to? Know this stranger?”

“Speaking of weird riddles. I thought I knew what was in my head, but now? Now it’s crowded. With this stranger.”

“Whatever’s in your head’s in your head. Think about whatever, or whoever, you want to think about.” He pauses. “But do you remember when we were kids, when I wanted so bad to adopt that dog? The one at the shelter, and my mom said I couldn’t?”

It’s not the first time the orchardist has bewildered the beekeeper. “I guess I do.”

“I totally knew he would be the best dog ever.” He says this with full conviction. When the beekeeper says nothing, he goes on, “So I can’t ever have a dog.” He waits; she can’t think of anything to say. “Because I don’t want to know.” The beekeeper considers asking “know what?”, but he speaks again. “Because what if the other dog doesn’t measure up?”

“What if the—what?”

“But then again, what if it does?” Now he stops and waits. He _settles in_ to wait.

The beekeeper wants to call the worker bee back and ask if she would be so kind as to unnerve the orchardist again. “Your parables are even worse than your jokes,” she tells him.

He chortles. “Riddle me this: why did the beekeeper cross the road?”

She crosses her arms in refusal.

“To get to the other hiiiiive.”

“I stand corrected.”

“No, okay. Why did the beekeeper cross the road?”

She glares and says, “To get away from the orchardist.” He grins widely, and she rolls her eyes. “Because he kept talking about some dog that wasn’t even his.”

“I’m just saying, you get an idea stuck in your head.”

“An idea of what?”

“Of how things are. What they oughta be like. Or strangers, how they are. What they oughta be like.”

“Is that so awful?” This, she’s really asking.

“It’s so stuck. And then you’re stuck. So think about whatever you want. All I’m saying is, I don’t want a dog anymore.”

“I don’t either. In fact I never did.”

“Yeah. Why did the beekeeper cross the road?”

“Fine. I give up. Why did the beekeeper cross the road?”

He can smile like an angel when he wants to. “She didn’t. It was a trick of the light.”

The afternoon sun has begun its descent through the trees, making their white blossoms flicker with pink and gold translucence, encouraging them to glow from within, lighting their edges on fire. The bees are still hard at it; they do good work in the afternoon, as if they feel the pressure of the light changing its angle, pushing down against them, warning them that the bright hours in any day are limited and that they must make the most of those that remain.

“Why did the beekeeper cross the road?” the beekeeper asks.

“Your turn, huh? Okay, why?”

“You’ll laugh.”

“Hit me.”

“I honestly don’t know,” she says.

He does laugh. Then he says, “That isn’t funny.”

“That, I do know,” she tells him.

****

The beekeeper does not in fact have to cross any road to make her way home from the orchard. She walks along the side of the road for a time, on the crumbling lip of pavement that threatens to collapse into the drainage ditch, then hops the ditch and cuts back into the woods.

She is not at all surprised to find, as she gains on her own property, that she is no longer walking alone. “It’s you,” she sighs, and she could not have said if the sigh signified resignation or contentment.

“It is,” assures a warm voice. It continues, “Where have you been?”

“I don’t know why you’re asking. You know the answer.”

“Have you been to the orchard?”

The beekeeper glances to the side. She receives a sly dart of dark eyes in return. “You know I have.”

“Why have you been to the orchard?”

“To see my friend.” The beekeeper snorts a tiny snort, corrects herself: “To be lectured by my friend.”

“Lectured about what?”

“Ideals. Light. Riddles.”

“Ideals. Light. Riddles?”

“Yeah. You’d’ve felt right at home.”

“At home. In the orchard?”

The beekeeper can hear the smile. She feels her own mouth begin to curve involuntarily in response. “In the orchard. In the orchard, lecturing me about riddles.” She tries to shake the smile from her face. She can’t. “Ideals, and light, and riddles.”

She knows the words are coming, and they do: “Oh, beekeeper,” she hears, and the utterance is this time replete with indulgence. The beekeeper turns her head, reaches out a hand in a movement as reflexive as her smile. But the path beside her is empty. She sighs again; as before, she could not have said if it signified resignation or contentment.

TBC

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> original tumblr tags: I keep writing scenes for this story and then setting them aside, because it isn't time for them yet, it's an exercise in patience for me possibly just wtf for you, I feel guilty about the skunks too though, apparently you can try fencing around your hives to keep them out, but while that would also be rather symbolically appropriate, I felt that the nails and the blood would pack more of a punch, because the beekeeper is not playing


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Over on tumblr, I wrote a sort of lengthy, relatively off-topic ramble to introduce this part, but here I guess I'll keep it short and just give the last sentence of that intro: it said, "I'm vamping 'cause even in the context of this strange piece, this part's a weirdsicle."

If there is a rhythm, a pattern, the beekeeper cannot find it. The dark woman appears when she will; she questions, she lectures, she cajoles. Then she disappears, and if there is a generalizable cause of that? The beekeeper cannot find that either: displeasure, gratification, boredom? Caprice alone? Or is it all structured upon a calculus that the beekeeper is too dull to grasp?

She conversely has no trouble grasping that she has become habituated to, even reliant upon, the state of affairs. The woman is endlessly annoying, but she manages at the same time to be endlessly companionable as she challenges and accepts in equal measure. Saying words that satisfy her, as well as words that thwart her: both are strange luxuries, ones on which the beekeeper finds herself placing a higher and higher value.

Then again, the beekeeper does sometimes consider that it might be best to heed the orchardist and loose this fixity from her mind. “You’re trespassing,” the beekeeper envisions telling her, “and you should stop.” But she most likely wouldn’t listen. She wouldn’t pay any attention, wouldn’t care at all for what the beekeeper said, not about this; she would still come back as often as she wished, and the beekeeper wonders if in the end it would do to set up some elaborate trap, as for wild animals, in order to capture her and finally either hold her or send her away for good. But the beekeeper cannot really imagine setting up such a trap: digging a pit, or stringing up a net from a tree… or rather, she can imagine it, can imagine a shovel’s handle blistering her palms, heavy dirt leaving one place and piling in another, hot sweat gathering between her shoulder blades. Because she can imagine what would come next,  that voice in her ear, asking “What are you doing, beekeeper?”, and she can imagine answering “digging a hole in the ground.” And she can certainly imagine what would follow: “Why are you digging a hole in the ground? For what purpose do you need a hole in the ground? What will be the magnitude of this hole in the ground? How long will you work to complete it? And what will you do after you do this?”

The beekeeper tells her mind to just… quiet down. No matter how illusory that voice is, it does not belong in her imagination; she hears it enough when the dark woman pays her patternless, hallucinatory visits.

She at least is no longer surprised by those visits. When she is at the hives, she always, now, half-expects to hear a murmur of “beekeeper” from somewhere over her shoulder, to turn her head from whatever she is attempting to accomplish and confront an impudent smirk. Or sometimes it is the blur, the coalescence of shadow that cannot help but draw her eye, followed by a breathy “What is your task today?”

Today, in fact, her task is to catch a few hundred bees from each hive, one hive at a time, into a jar, to add powdered sugar, and to shake. She then uncaps the jar, covers the opening with mesh, and shakes it over a clean white board. Varroa mites, like tiny amber heads of pins, fall onto the board. _Varroa destructor_ , the little monsters are called, and they infest drone cells and suck the haemolymph of the adult bees. Some mites are to be expected, and accepted, in any hive, so the beekeeper is not concerned by the first few that fall, unable as they are to cling to the sugar-coated bees. She will take steps only if the numbers increase. All is well in the first hive she checks, however, and the jarred bees are beside themselves with joy to be surrounded by what is, to them, such a vast quantity of pure sugar for which they do not have to work. She moves to shake them back into the hive so their sisters can lick them clean.

“You like to show up for this,” she says to the disturbance of air, right before it resolves. “Is it something about the sugar?” Because this is not a sure thing—nothing is a sure thing—but she has arrived during the sugar shake more than once.

“It is something about what it is about, beekeeper,” are the words that come her way.

The beekeeper supposes this utterance is no more mysterious than any other. “Okay,” she says. She keeps working: next hive. Cover off, puff of smoke. She takes the piece of bent metal flashing she uses to collect the bees and sets it atop the hive; then she pulls out a frame and shakes that, gently, so the dazed workers will tumble into the aluminum channel. Frame back in, then a quick tilt of the metal to send the bees into the jar.

“You are quiet today,” she hears. “Why are you quiet today?”

“I’m quiet every day,” she points out.

“Perhaps. But why are you quiet _today_?”

“Because I _am_ quiet.”

“Nonsense. It is not an unchanging _attribute_. You can no doubt be inquiet. Under provocation.”

“I don’t think ‘inquiet’ is what you mean.”

“No? And here I thought to provoke you.”

“I mean ‘inquiet’ isn’t really the opposite of quiet. Quiet in the sense of not talking.”

“Well, then, perhaps you would be so kind as to perform the opposite of quiet. In the sense of talking. In the sense of talking, perhaps you would be so kind as to tell me something.”

The beekeeper finds more and more difficulty, the more and more she indulges the dark woman, in resisting the urge to indulge the dark woman. “Okay,” she says. “I’ll tell you something.”

“What will you tell me?”

“A story,” says the beekeeper, as she measures out sugar into the jar.

“A story.”

“That’s what I said. Once upon a time, a man was traveling to the land of his beloved to ask for her hand in marriage.”

“Your story is of a man and his beloved? Really?”

Her evident disappointment makes the beekeeper laugh. “Too stereotypical for you? You think you know what’s going to happen? Just hang on. A lion attacked him.”

“That is better. Tell me of the lion.”

“Well. You shouldn’t get too attached, because the man was endowed with divine strength. He ripped the lion apart.”

“That is unpleasant. And unjustified. Surely the lion was behaving only as its nature intended?”

“That’s really not my problem. So anyway, the man didn’t tell anybody this happened. He continued on, and he and his beloved were betrothed.” She pauses to shake the jar over the white board. Not many mites at all, and again the bees, while a bit indignant at being shaken, are humming with delight over the sugar.

The dark woman is clearly not so delighted, for she grumbles, “Well, beekeeper, this story was not—”

“Did I say ‘the end’?” the beekeeper asks mildly.

“You did not.”

“Okay then.” She dumps the bees back into their hive and moves on to the next. “So later he was traveling back to his betrothed, for feasting, for their wedding. And he came upon the carcass of the lion, in which a colony of bees had made their home.”

“In the carcass of a lion?” She sounds skeptical.

“In the first place, it’s a story. But in the second place, think about it.”

“Think what about it?”

“I don’t know what you know and what you don’t, but: look.” She opens the hive, smokes it, beckons to the dark woman, points. “In here. Look at the frames, the spacing. Three-eighths of an inch. Bee space. If there’s less space than that, they repair the gap with propolis—and of course if they’re busy repairing, they aren’t doing other work. If there’re more space, they’ll build comb, and I’d have to cut that comb to get the frames out, and that’s a huge mess. So exactly three-eighths of an inch.”

“I did not know this _number_.”

“The frames are exactly as close as they need to be. Look at them: that white, perfect scaffold. They’ve always made me think of ribs.” She pulls one out and shakes its bees into the flashing.

“A lion’s chest?”

“From there, the man took a handful of honey. I always imagined he took it from where the lion’s heart once lived.” Into the jar, on to the sugar.

“Well, I suppose the story did improve a bit. But who told you this strange story that concludes with honey from a lion’s chest?”

“My mother, the first time I said that the frames looked like ribs. But listen, did I say ‘the end’ yet?”

“You did not.”

“The man travelled on. And do you know what he did when he got to where he was going?”

“Did he give the honey to his beloved?” Now she sounds more eager.

And the beekeeper is unaccountably sad to have to disappoint her: “Well, no. He ate the honey himself. Before, on the road.”

“So selfish, this man.”

“More likely he was just hungry. Probably like the lion was.”

The dark woman sniffs. “At least someone’s nature was satisfied.”

“Actually I’m pretty sure he gave some to his parents too. But so, what he did was, he told his thirty feasting companions that he would give them thirty garments if they could solve a riddle.” She directs her attention to the blank white board.

“Riddle?” There is a frisson in the query that makes the beekeeper look up: the woman’s own dark garments swirl around her, as if they have been awakened by the word.

She looks back down: still no great number of mites. Nothing of note. “Yeah. I thought that’d get your attention. And if they couldn’t solve it, they had to give him thirty garments instead.”

“What is the riddle?”

“Out of the eater, something to eat; out of the strong, something sweet,” the beekeeper quotes.

“What is the answer?”

“I just told you the answer. Weren’t you paying attention?”

“Honey from a lion’s chest? That is the answer?”

“Right.”

“But how were the companions to know this?”

“They weren’t. I think that was the idea. Anyway, everything goes really poorly after that: they go to the man’s betrothed during the feasting and threaten to burn down her father’s house unless she finds out the answer, so she begs the man to tell her, and he does, and she tells them, and then they tell him they’ve solved it—I actually like the answer they give; it’s ‘What is sweeter than honey? And what is stronger than a lion?’—but then he gets angry because they went to her for the answer. He kills thirty people and takes their fine garments to give to the groomsmen.”

“I do not think he understood their answer. Had he understood it, the story might have come to a far sweeter conclusion, for—”

“Did I say ‘the end’?” the beekeeper asks, for a third time, and she knows it is the third time, and she knows she will receive the same answer, for a third time, and she does: “You did not,” the woman answers.

It is weirdly precious to be able to request and receive those words. They are not a comfort, not precisely, but the beekeeper wants to put them in a box to show to the orchardist when next he lectures her on whatever ideal he thinks she should not hold in her head. He wouldn’t be so quick with his parables, would he, if she opened a box to reveal “you did not,” with the curve of those lips, the tilt of that chin, the pitch of those cheekbones, shimmering, sharp, sly. Or she could put each “you did not” in a separate box, a museum case of its own, and she would open them one by one, to ring through their changes: the first straightforward, the second with its dusting of frustration, and the third this perfect little puckish barb of concession.

Each utterance is perfect in its way, and in fact… in fact, she would not show any one of them to the orchardist. She would, she will, keep them to herself. And she will line their cases with velvet, and she will close those cases gently and stack them. Stack them like deeps.

“Anyway, there’s not much more.” the beekeeper says, and she is speaking of the story, but she might be referring to herself, too, for she is moving on to the final hive. “Ultimately, the man gets even angrier because his wife’s father gives her to somebody else; he ties torches to foxes’ tails and they burn a bunch of cornfields, and all kinds of other things happen, and he ends up slaying a thousand people with the jawbone of an ass.” She stops; no rejoinder is forthcoming. “Okay, you win. I won’t go any further. The end.”

“That is overall a terrible story.”

“Maybe. It’s actually kind of well-known. My mother told it to me, because of the ribs, like I said, but it’s from the Bible.”

“Is it.”

The beekeeper nods. “Judges.”

“Does it.”

“No, the _book_ of… right. Okay. Are you teasing me again?”

“If you like.”

“What I like doesn’t generally seem to be the point here.”

“Nor is what I might like, beekeeper.”

“How should I know what you’ll like and what you won’t?”

“You guess well with riddles…”

The beekeeper shrugs. “Like I said, I thought it’d get your attention. And it certainly beats ‘why did the beekeeper cross the road.’”

“Why did the beekeeper cross the road.” As if she is trying out the syllables.

“I wish I knew.”

Petulance: “I think you do know. I think you know many things, but you will not _tell me_. Instead you seek to distract me with a story in which you fail to attend to that which is salient.”

“What? What didn’t I attend to?” She accidentally pours too much powdered sugar into the jar and has to shake it around and out quickly, so as not to suffocate the bees.

“It is not for _me_ to tell _you_.”

“I told you about bee space. You said you didn’t know it.” The words come out in a pouty sulk, because who is the dark woman to complain?

“A _number_. Three-eighths of an inch. A number,” the woman repeats, and now it is her lips pressing into a pout. “What conclusions you have drawn.”

“I didn’t draw that conclusion; Lorenzo Langstroth did, in the 1800s. He’s the one who figured it out, and he invented these hives, with the frames.”

“Frames like ribs. Ribs that would enclose a heart. What lies at the heart of a hive?”

“Here we go again.”

“What _is_ the heart of a hive?”

“Please.”

“Pleas are the heart of a hive? I think not. What is the heart of any thing? Any creature?”

The beekeeper exhales. “I don’t know. I feel like those poor feasting companions. How am I supposed to know? And you don’t have a beloved I can go threaten the answer out of, either.”

“Oh, beekeeper.” This time, dissatisfied. The beekeeper looks down, looks up, expects absence. But the dark woman is still present, and she is shaking her dark head. Then she stops shaking her head, and she looks on the beekeeper, looks and says nothing, looks and does nothing.

The beekeeper looks too, looks and looks: a deep slaking. Eventually both their gazes crumble, and now the beekeeper is the one to shake her head, her veiled head. She smiles. “I and this mystery here we stand,” she says, a length of humor stropping the words.

“This mystery…” And the way she says it: the beekeeper had not known that _mystery_ could be an onomatopoeia. “Yet another biblical riddle, beekeeper?”

“Almost, but no, in the Bible, there’s only the one. In the whole Bible, only ‘out of the eater.’”

“One? Beekeeper, no. I beg of you, listen to yourself speak.”

“No, ‘I and this mystery’—it isn’t biblical… though I guess it might as well be; it’s a psalm, anyway. Whitman. I’d say what comes next, but I don’t think it’s true.”

The woman shakes her head again, and this time it looks like resignation. She sighs out, “What comes next?”

“Clear and sweet is my soul,” the beekeeper sighs back.

“Is your soul not sweet?”

“No, not sweet. And certainly not clear.”

“How does one sweeten and clear the soul?”

The beekeeper upends the final jarful of sugary, ecstatic bees back into their home. She covers the hive, then straightens her spine, feels it seize, puts a hand to her back. “Well, okay, that’s a riddle.”

“Is it?”

Despite the beekeeper’s veil, those words come too near her ear, they are a hot vibration of breath on her neck. Then her skin is cool again, and she is alone before the hives. She would bet, though, that if there had been some way to measure the distance between her ear and the speaking lips, the space through which those two words had vibrated? “Three-eighths of an inch,” she tells the bees, then asks them: “What’s the heart of a hive?” And next: “How does one sweeten and clear the soul?”   _Industrious work!_ is the only answer they seem to want to give to any inquiry, so she leaves them to it.

That night, she reads Whitman, lets him question and lecture her to sleep, wonders how the dark woman has managed to push her way, push her voice, so far into the poem: “Do you guess I have some intricate purpose?” Whitman asks, but the intonation in the beekeeper’s head is all womanly smoke. “Will you speak before I am gone? will you prove already too late?”

When the beekeeper falls asleep, the dreams that visit her are made of hot, lax breath whispering answers she does not understand: in her ear, on her skin, everywhere, all the restless night long.

The next time the beekeeper attempts to open a hive, she feels a resistance. She pulls harder at the lid, and she hears—feels—a soft, moist crack as it gives way into her hands. Honey begins to ooze free. Bees gather immediately to eat as much as they can, because even they know what this means: the comb has reached above the frames of the super, all the way to the lid, built and filled and now broken open, and the time for the first honey harvest has come.

TBC

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> original part 5 tumblr tags: I know it's weird, but there is something about the violence of the lion story, the way it escalates, it's in Judges 14 if you want to take a look, the man in question is Samson, yes of 'and Delilah' fame, though she comes along later, and as I've said before, I don't practice a particular religion, nevertheless I do find the Bible fascinating as literature, as texts of so many religions are, anyway if you're still following along in this little tag discourse, then let me tease a bit of the next part, for the introduction of honey into the situation is quite significant, in that I will at last to some extent shut up about bees already, and perhaps get to that other thing


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you ever need something to wow your ears, I recommend Ella Fitzgerald’s version of the nigh-on-impossible-to-sing “Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most.” Not as a soundtrack to anything in particular, necessarily, but just to feel in your bones how deep she has to dig to get down for its last line.

Honey is a culmination.

It begins as a molecular murmur: an articulation of a flower’s need. Bees and their ilk heed this call, their own want leading them to find what the flower pretends to hide. Do they think themselves thieves, secretly dipping tongues into nectaries? Bees know a great many things, but do they know that the sugar-water they take is in fact compensation for their clumsiness in fumbling pollen crumbs from other flowers into this one, in dislodging this one’s dust and failing to notice that their furry bodies carry it along to the next bloom they plunder?

The nectar, the incipient honey, travels to the hive, where each bumbling little bandit kisses the liquid to one of her sisters, mouth to working mouth, this transfer one more step along, forward, up. It has traveled in a hurry, but now it waits: discharged into cells in the hot hive to evaporate, to intensify, for nectar is weak, but honey is strong. The bees, who need to work—because there can be satisfaction and strength in nothing without work; they know this too—hurry matters along, fanning the cells with their wings, and at the right moment… and they know the exact moment, they always know when the honey has _become_ … they stop, they calm their wings, they crown the cell with wax.

Desire and sweetness and work and time: honey is their culmination.

To the beekeeper, however, honey is not the end, but the beginning.

Harvesting honey is a challenge, for the harvest must be undertaken in a space the bees cannot reach. If bees catch a whiff of honey anywhere outside the hive, they will find it and ferry it, drop by precious slow drop, back home where they _know_ it belongs. So anyone who harvests honey must have a honey house.

The beekeeper’s honey house is a tarpapered airtight box of a shed. Her father built it for her mother, and while the beekeeper feels nostalgia for it as a space, she is no Luddite when it comes to the harvest itself. She has felt no qualms about making modifications: a small furnace now warms it on days when the tarpaper absorbs insufficient sunlight to raise its temperature as high as that of the hive. A dehumidifier now dries its air, always, because honey wants nothing more than to revert to nectar; parched by bees’ wings, it will greedily suck moisture from any source it finds, then ferment and spoil. A powered extractor, one able to spin the honey from twenty frames at once, years ago replaced her mother’s hand-cranked version. A pump now does the work of the simple tap through which the honey had once run. The beekeeper uses an electric, heated knife to slice the wax caps from the comb cells…. this, she had resisted for some time, out of respect for the bees’ industry; the labor of heating a knife, using the strength of her arm to wield it, served as a tribute. But she had sprained her wrist one year, and the pain was excruciating. She tried to work through it, but the orchardist rolled his eyes at her. “Yeah. Make it worse. Punish yourself. Excellent plan,” he said. The beekeeper begrudged him the point, but she conceded.

Now she inspects all the equipment to ensure it is in good order: honeying must be precise and perfect, just as its product is precise and perfect. The process must be smooth… she is comforted by the whirrs and hums made by the machinery, the immediate vibration and heat of the knife.

She goes to the hives to begin to remove the heavy, saturated honey supers. It feels slightly early, this honey, but the bees would scoff at the idea of the blooms keeping to any schedule but their own. She lifts the first hive’s cover slightly, smokes only the barest of puffs at the top of its super. Oversmoking now would adversely affect the honey’s flavor, which to her first taste was fine. Quite fine. _A good honey year_ , she had thought at that first taste. _This will be a good honey year._

The beekeeper waits.

Bees take their time to climb down into the hive body from the honey super, and the beekeeper knows how to be patient. She knows how to take this time to gather her thoughts, to consider the tasks that await her in the honey house. But today she is restless, prickly, and when she realizes why, it is a further irritant: she had expected a visitation. She had expected company, but she has none. _Will you speak before I am gone?_ resounds in her head.

“I could tell you something,” she says out loud, into the air. “I would.”

“Would you.”

Within the beekeeper, something quickens: nothing so physical as her blood’s march or her breath, but some prickle of an idea convulses, juddering to life. She does not turn her head, but she says, “Eighteen percent.”

“Oh, beekeeper,” the dark woman chides.

“I bet you didn’t know that one either,” the beekeeper says. She turns now, and through her veil, she watches the dark woman’s mouth form a smirk. “It’s the water content of honey… that’s when they cap it. Nobody knows how the bees know when it gets there, but they do. They never get it wrong.”

“Indeed, you are correct: this _number_ , too, I did not know.”

Her voice is a balm. Here she is, saying _number_ again, and her voice is a balm. The beekeeper says, “I had thought you’d show up for the honey.”

“Why?”

The best words the beekeeper can find are, “It’s important. I had thought you would, because it’s important.”

“Taking what you want from the hive? That is important?”

The beekeeper knows the arguments against honeying: it is exploitation, nothing but thievery, stealing the bees’ honest labor. But what do those moralizers know of bees and of beekeeping? Harvesting honey does the bees no harm. She knows the bite of having betrayed them; she has taken from them what was not hers to give. Stood next to that, honeying is _nothing_. She says, and to her own ears she sounds defensive, stubborn: “It’s just what’s in the honey super. That’s all I’m taking. I’m not taking what they need.”

“I did not say that you were. I do say, however, that you take it because you want it.”

Fruitless to protest. “You don’t know what I want.”

“I imagine that you do take whatever it is that you want. But what do you want?”

The beekeeper shakes her head, beneath her veil.

“What do you want?” the dark woman repeats. “Tell me. What do you want?”

“I don’t want anything.” She is lying: what she wants over all is to stop saying and hearing “want.” She shakes her head again. “I have to get the super now.”

The full super is fifty pounds of honey, wax, and wood. By the time the beekeeper reaches the honey house with it, her arms are burning, and she is dissolving in her gear. She deposits the super inside and backs out. She closes the door on it. She strips off her veil, her gloves, her white jumpsuit. She lowers herself, panting lightly, to sit on the shed’s tiny stoop.

The dark woman, who has followed her, prods, “Are you waiting, beekeeper? Anticipating the taking?”

The beekeeper grimaces. “I’m _sweating_.” She wipes her now-naked forehead with the back of her bare hand. She feels and welcomes a breeze.

“Such _effort_ you put forth. Such _strength_ you exert.”

The beekeeper isn’t sure if those words are intended to be complimentary, so she doesn’t respond. She pushes herself to stand, and she opens the door to the house. “Come in if you’re coming in,” she says, and adds, “hurry,” though she has no idea whether a closed door would have any effect on the situation. But she _has to_ close the door before a bee or a wasp or any other honey-interested party sneaks in.

“Shall I?”

As if the question is a question. As if it is up to the beekeeper to make a choice.

Fine. “Yes,” says the beekeeper, finally and _fine_. Because “no” could not possibly make a difference. Almost certainly, “no” would not make a difference.

And just like that, there are two bodies in the honey house.

The harvest is sticky, rhythmic work. Pulling a frame from the super, beheading its capped cells with the hot knife, sliding it into the extractor—this labor, over and over, the sharp yank, the thrumming cut, the deft push. Familiar.

But the beekeeper is not at all familiar with the tug of alertness in her body as the dark woman watches her do this work in the honey house. The beekeeper is too aware; she has too many eyes that show her too many dark details; she smells the lingering green hint of nectar, even the weird thick starch of pollen. She hears the machinery as an overly prominent ostinato she should know by heart but does not.

The beekeeper wets her mouth, licks her lips. Because the air is dry: only because the air is dry.

The air is dry and yet not dry, because the sweaty weight of honey is everywhere too—in the air, yes, and on every surface, seeping into skin, turning even clothing into sugar. The beekeeper, as a child, would suck on her sleeve, would lick the backs of her hands, tasting herself salty-sweet, thinking her blood must now be syrup and brine.

She raises her eyes from her known tasks to look upon the dark woman, who is rotating slowly, as if the house’s interior shows stations, as if she must learn them. Her back is now to the beekeeper. Her back and also the backs of her hands.

But as the beekeeper breathes in sweet and stares at sweetened skin and thinks of tongues and liquid, the dark woman turns around. Dark eyes read the beekeeper’s eyes. And the dark woman turns around again, but as she does so, she reaches back to her neck. She lifts her hair, her now sugar-heavied hair, higher. She offers her neck—and it is suddenly the brightest flower, able to draw any eye, all eyes, and the beekeeper could not have represented in any way the path she took, for she later had no memory of her steps, few though they had to have been. No memory, only the knowledge of distance, then less, then closeness, and the honey house in an instant loses all air, and the beekeeper bends to the dark woman’s neck, takes just the barest taste of it, as she had of the first golden uncapped bit of comb… (this taste, if sucked from comb, would tell of the most glorious of years). The beekeeper puts her mouth entirely to that neck, and she hears a new and different sound from the dark woman: not a hum, not at all, but half a laugh, or the beginning gasp of a sob, a sound that the beekeeper instantly wants to complete, to make thick and full.

The beekeeper had not known how fully this slow nectar on another’s skin could satisfy. She had not known how lethargically urgent a mouth could be, how the sighs that escaped it could whisper of smoke and psalms. She had not known how she could in one moment be curious about the dark woman’s clothes, and then in the next feel that what those clothes _are_ could not matter; all that matters is that they are _not_ , so she can find her way inside, where the secrets happen, where the difference is made, this inevitable, viscous difference. She breathes honey around her, tastes honey beneath, dense, concentrating, intensifying, rendering her insensate in seeking more, and further, until everything else disappears, dissipates, dissolves.

After some gap of dreamless time, the beekeeper stirs, blinks open stuporous eyes. She is alone. In the hot, dry honey house, alone and appalled.

“Mad honey,” she says, her voice parched and cracked, because that is what it must be. That is what must have _happened_ : a mad-honey fever dream, a crazed toxic overtaking of her mind—the bees have always been so bloom loyal, so flower constant, and yet the symptoms, there they _were_ , she should have _known_ : salivation, perspiration, dizziness, weakness and paresthesia in the extremities—around the _mouth_ —blurred vision, hallucinations, fainting… madness. Mad honey, and she is still in this house with it, still uptaking it through her pores, still likely to succumb again to the wrench it puts to the real. Mad honey: it must be the cause of everything, every moment of what has happened; the bees, the bees must have been so angry, holding their rage, biding their time, seeking out rhododendrons and making mad honey in order to reach into her head and extract the wants she could never speak of, that she had determined never to let invade this part of her world again.

She must get rid of it, rid herself of it—she yanks the frames from the extractor, shoves them back into the super, hefts the box with strength that is not yet restored, and she stumbles her way out, trips, falls, scrambles, the super now dirty, honey and soil mixing and sticking. She falls again and again, scratches, scrapes, blood, loathing. Honey, dirt, blood, nausea.

There is a creek at the far edge of her property: the nearest flowing water.

It is the cleanest place she can think of. It is where she went to try to cleanse herself the last time.

****

“Maybe you should get out more.” Those words, uttered by the woman from the city, had stayed with the beekeeper. They wormed into her, woke her in the night, embarrassed her even when no one was there to see. “Get out more.” Get out where? Get out to what purpose? To what velvety, obscure purpose?

On an afternoon, a warm, lovely afternoon, the beekeeper returned from hiving and was startled to find the woman from the city waiting for her, waiting blond and breeze-blown.

“Let me,” the woman said, and she moved close. She raised her hands and began to release the beekeeper’s veil.

“Let you?” asked the beekeeper, confused. But then she was no longer confused, because her veil was lifted from her face, and she was being kissed.

The beekeeper pulled her mouth away even as she was beginning to let herself understand an enjoyment, to let herself absorb this inclination. “Why would you do that?”

“Because I wanted to. And I thought you wanted me to.”

The beekeeper tried to say no, tried to explain and maintain that this was a purpose of which she wanted no part. She thought she had learned she wanted no part of it, years ago, when she and the orchardist were teenagers, when he took her on a date (because he took all the girls on dates), then kissed her at the end of the evening. “I don’t think so,” she’d said, and he’d asked her, “Could you think again?” She tried—but spending time with him became a challenge instead of an exasperated pleasure. She took him with her to the hives, but she was unsettled, and the bees were angry, with her, with him, and that was the end of that. That was the end, she thought, of that purpose; the bees did not find her fit for it, or it for her. The hive knew.

The beekeeper did not want the bees to be angry with her again, nor with the woman from the city, so she tried again to say no—but her mouth balked. Instead, some hard edge of her softened, deliquesced. She said yes.

She did not tell the bees about what had happened with the woman from the city, not about the kiss or what followed. She did not tell them anything. Instead, she asked them: “When my mother told you about my father, did her voice sound like this?”

Duped. _Smiling_ as she drove her truck the next day down a road she would otherwise have had no reason to travel, heading for the house rented by the woman from the city. “I could look for a place to buy,” the woman had whispered into the beekeeper’s ear. The beekeeper did not respond with words, but she thought, _When my father told my mother he might stay, did she feel like this?_

Duped. _Springing_ from the truck, alight, still smiling, her face sore, unaccustomed to the stretch of the smile. That there was no answer to her knock on the door suggested that the woman from the city was hiving—yes, a perfect time of day for it. The beekeeper heard again a whisper of promise.

Duped. _Striding_ through the backyard, seeing the blond hair of the woman from the city glinting hints of gold through the veil in the late-spring sun, her back to the beekeeper… so the beekeeper watched the woman from the city inspect the hive. Watched her oversmoke the poor bees, but even the beekeeper herself had done that at the beginning. Watched her tilt frames at the wrong angle to see, and hence to count, brood at the bottom of the cells—but the beekeeper was here now, and the beekeeper could show her. The beekeeper _would_ show her, would teach her, would veil her and unveil her… the beekeeper began to nod along to a hum in her head—or was it a strange, new hum from the hive?—a hum from which she thought she heard emergent peaks of “yes… yes… yes.”

The woman from the city turned around. She saw the beekeeper, smiled too at the beekeeper; then she moved, a bit quickly for the bees’ taste, in the beekeeper’s direction. She pulled off her veil, a bit early for the beekeeper’s taste.

And yet the beekeeper was so pleased to see that face, unveiled. So pleased. Smiling—that pull of muscles—and they were both smiling, and the beekeeper moved forward, and she saw, as she moved, that the woman from the city was removing her gloves, and the beekeeper could barely contain herself at the thought of those hands. But something awkward was happening; the woman from the city held something in her hands, something small, and the beekeeper recognized that something.

A small contraption of cork and mesh it was, not large enough to cover even a palm.

The beekeeper staggered. She tried to ask, but she could not tell if she made any sound at all, “What have you done?”

For it was a queen cage, and seeing it, the beekeeper knew she was too late. The instructions would have come with this new queen in her cage: kill the old queen, then wait twenty-four hours before bringing the new queen to the hive for requeening. Kill the old queen. Kill the old queen. The beekeeper was twenty-four hours too late. “You didn’t need a new queen,” she said, this time with sound. “I gave you a queen. She wasn’t old. I queened your hive.”

The woman from the city said, “I don’t understand. It’s a _bee_. Isn’t it just a bee?”

Just a bee. “I gave her to you. She was mine, and I gave her to you.”

“But you said supersedure was natural! If there was no more use for her, you said. If she couldn’t do what she was supposed to do!”

The beekeeper was sick and horrified. Horrified and _sick_. “She could! She did!” The beekeeper pulled a frame, an oversmoked frame. She tilted it, held it at the correct angle, _showed_ her the uncapped brood, pointed at the capped cells full of growing pupae, then choked out, “I told you, they don’t cap empty cells, you can _see_ if you _look_ correctly. The hive knows better than you do. The hive knows better than I do.” She wanted to throw herself upon its mercy—and she hoped it would show no mercy—because it was true. “The hive knows better than I do.”

She had let it happen. She had been distracted, deceived by want into relaxing her vigilance, failing to make sure of something so basic as the importance of an angle in the sunlight… and this was the result: a murdered queen, a confused hive, those persistent, resilient, fragile bodies frantic for direction. They would have worked themselves to death for their now-dead queen.

The beekeeper had driven back along the road she had no reason to travel. She sat in her house and listened to knocks on her door, to a voice that at first questioned, then pleaded, then scorned.

Some days later, the orchardist told the beekeeper, “I heard that lady left.”

So the beekeeper traveled the road again, the one she had no reason to travel, this time on foot, a long walk. The hive was still there, innocently standing in the yard, as if nothing had happened there.

The guilty beekeeper stood next to the hive. When within it she heard the start of a noise, she realized that it had been unnaturally, unnervingly quiet, as if waiting for a witness…

Before her eyes, one bee emerged, then two, then three, then more, then uncountably many, and then all the bees of the hive swarmed—up and away, a cyclone of righteous anger: at the regicide, at the beekeeper, at all the presumptions and folly and waste of civilizations not their own.

The bright sun had bubbled the still-fresh paint of the hive, turned it viscid. The beekeeper pressed her palms and the pads of her fingers to the hot, empty box; they came away slicked with white.

She held her hands in front of her, beheld them, as she retraced her steps: a long walk, a penitential walk. Echoes of the simmering, seething roar of the bees rang in her ears.

When she reached the creek, she knelt down. She placed her hands in the water, felt the skims that coated them begin to loosen.

She told no one.

The ensuing winter left her restless—restless as she had never been before, even in the cold, even in the absence of hive tasks. The woman from the city had awakened something in her, and she tried to deny it, ignore it. She lost weight, and the orchardist brought candy-apple pies made by his mother. He said, “I know you’ve got honey around here too. It’s not just for the tourists and bees, you know.” But the beekeeper had never had any true taste for honey: she sampled it when she began the harvest, to discover what kind of honey year it would be, to determine what words to say to describe it to those who would buy. But she had no taste for it.

What she did have a taste for pushed her into her truck and onto the highway, toward the city. Maintenance, she told herself. Upkeep. Like cleaning the nail-boards of blood. The clothes she wore when she went, she was careful never to wear to visit the hives.

When spring came, she calmed to the resumption of routine. Her grateful hands manipulated the supers, her grateful eyes beheld the bees; even her lungs were grateful, receiving with each breath the green, tangy beginning of blossoms.

****

Now the beekeeper sits—dirty, bloody, sticky—beside the water. She watches the honey swirl away, no doubt relieved to be escaping her, joyful in dilution.

She is suddenly accompanied.

The dark woman kneels beside the beekeeper. She reaches to the edge of the super, where it protrudes from the shallow water. She draws a finger through the honey that the creek is sluicing from it; she raises that finger to her mouth.

“Don’t!” the beekeeper exclaims.

“You seem to have no better plans for this pretty bead,” says the dark woman. She turns her finger to and fro, letting the amber creep forth, glide back.

“It’s mad honey.” And it is an echo of its madness that makes the beekeeper begin to lean to put her own mouth to that hand again, to use her own tongue to capture that drop, to let all it contains overtake her.

Back and forth, the lazy, golden rondure. “It is not.”

“It explains everything.” The beekeeper looks at the water. She will not be mesmerized. This is a purpose of which she wants no part.

“It does not.”

“It can if I want it to.”

“Very well.” There is conclusiveness in the dark woman’s tone, an abruptly complete absence of mystery that makes the beekeeper look up again. The dark woman licks her finger with a quick and deliberate sideswipe of tongue. Then she stands. “If that is what you want.”

The beekeeper gazes at the dark woman’s body, watches that body turn away, beholds the swirl of garments she has from it so recently and fervently removed. Feels in her own dirty, bloody, sticky body a raw heavy ache.

“Wait,” she says.

TBC

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> original part 6 tumblr tags (slightly edited): almost done here, incidentally if you're keeping score with regard to rhododendron nectar, the problematic substance is grayanotoxin, a term that you'd think I could have slipped into the prose somewhere, given that I'm throwing all kinds of technical vocabulary around, but 'rhododendron' was bad enough, I genuinely don't like the way 'rhododendron' sounds or looks, I do like 'honey house' though, and no I did not make that up, it isn't my fault if the terminology basically dictates how the story will go, because now really, what else would happen there?


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Over on tumblr, this took me an embarrassingly long time to write to the end, but I wanted to get it at least a little bit right. Anyway, it all started because Joanne Kelly's character keeps bees in that Runoff movie. (And wears a veil and occasionally looks through it with just the right amount of blurry disquiet.) And then I read a bunch of the Bible, and Whitman and Pliny—like, who wouldn’t?—and put it in a blender and made a kind of workshoppy not-fully-realized exercise out of it, and here we are. I’m pretty self-aware; I know how ridiculous this is. And where we end up is banal in the extreme… but whatever.

“Wait,” the beekeeper says again, and “wait” for a third time, although the dark woman has stilled herself. She has stilled herself… but stillness might be nothing but a prelude to a punishing departure.

“To what purpose?” The words are nothing but respiration.

“I’ll tell you.”

“You will tell me the purpose of my waiting? Or will you at long last simply tell me?”

“The purpose of your waiting…  it’s so that I can tell you.”

“Yet another story?”

“You won’t like this one either.” The beekeeper wishes she were less certain.

Exhalation. “Tell me, beekeeper.”

“Well. Once upon a time there was a beekeeper. And she did terrible things.” The beekeeper breathes in, preparing. The dark woman sits beside her again, but the beekeeper cannot bear to turn and meet dark eyes as she tells this story: woman from the city, hope, preoccupation, foolishness, destruction. She says, “The paint didn’t all come off. Some of it got lodged under my fingernails. I could smell it there, taste it there, for weeks.” Then she falls silent. She waits—for condemnation, for abandonment, for whatever will happen next.

The dark woman is silent too, for at time. Then she says, with a timidity the beekeeper has not heard from her before, “Did you say ‘the end’?”

“I should have,” the beekeeper admits. “I should have said ‘the end’ right when it started. I shouldn’t have done any of it.”

“What is the difference between should and should not? The predators should not trespass the hive; the slow drones should not imagine they can catch the queen. The old queen should not struggle so as she relinquishes her crown.”

“Her life, you mean.”

“Yet she does struggle. And then she does relinquish.” She moves her shoulder, the one closest the beekeeper. A simple shrug, or a suggestive stretch of a muscle so recently worked? “We do what is in our nature.”

“We can choose to do other things,” the beekeeper says.

“You chose to tell me.”

“You wanted to know.”

“I wanted you to tell me.”

“What’s the difference?”

The woman runs her index finger, the finger that had dripped with honey, through the damp creek-bank dirt. Not mud; it has no give. Just damp dirt. “What _is_ the difference?”

“I don’t know. Confession? You wanted me to confess?”

“You do seem to believe that you committed any number of sins.”

The beekeeper shakes her head. “I’m not Catholic.”

“And yet you seek to be cleansed when you feel guilt.” She gestures toward the water, as if to bless it. A gentle sign, yet not quite a hand of benediction. “But what penance do you perform?”

The beekeeper resists genuflecting in response. She resists. Instead, she says, “I told you, I’m not Catholic.”

“I do not recall saying that you are. Why would you feel it an accusation?”

“My father’s Catholic.”

“I see. Yet more guilt.” The finger pushes again through the wetted dirt. “But what shall your penance be? What satisfaction shall you offer?”

“There’s a lot of honey in the creek.”

“That seems a price paid not by you but by others.”

She may have meant it only as a fact—for it is factual—but the beekeeper winces. “I thought they wanted to punish me. The bees. I thought they wanted to, because they should want to.”

“How intent you are on what should be wanted, rather than what is wanted. “

“What’s in our nature. Their nature, I mean. I thought I knew. I thought they were angry.”

“Perhaps. But anger regarding _what_ is momentary. That which lingers is a curiosity as to _why_.”

“Is that why you like riddles so much?” the beekeeper asks.

The dark woman regards the dirt on her finger. The beekeeper’s eyes are drawn to it as well: an inert mineral smudge, exhibiting no mystery or movement. “They reveal. They are the turning inside out of circumstance and communication, these around upon themselves, and thus to an unexpected revelatory why.” She runs that besmirched finger down the beekeeper’s arm. “Why did the beekeeper?”

“Why did the beekeeper what?”

“Exactly.”

They sit and nothing happens. Nothing but the trickle and flow of the water, in and around and over the wooden chest, its ribs now washed of their honey.

“Is it the end?” the beekeeper asks.

“I can’t tell you. Perhaps not, if you discern—if you _learn_ —the answer to the second biblical riddle.”

“There isn’t one!”

“The answer is in the answer, beekeeper.”

“Why would you do this to me?”

“The answer to that as well.”

“That answer is in the answer too?”

“It is, beekeeper.”

“A koan. Buddhism now? I thought we were doing Catholicism.”

“Did you.”

“Contrition, disclosure, satisfaction?”

“So many meanings those words bear. Perhaps we will sort them when you can tell me, beekeeper.”

Night is falling, so long have they sat by the moving water of the creek.

“Come, let us do what is in the nature of all creatures,” the dark woman says. She lies down, on her back, at the creek’s edge. She beckons in the dusk to the beekeeper. The beekeeper lies against her side, head against her darkly pilose shoulder.

“Noctu deprehensae in expeditione excubant…” the beekeeper sighs.

“Yet another prayer?”

“Maybe a description. ‘If on an expedition they are overtaken by nightfall…’” she begins to translate, but she is all at once herself overtaken by perfect exhaustion, and its welcome twin, relaxation. She sleeps.

When she awakens, the sun is up, yet the Pliny continues in her mouth as if she had not stopped for rest: “…excubant supinae, ut alas a rore protegant. ‘They will camp out lying on their backs, so as to protect their wings from the dew.’”

She is alone, with a streak of dirt upon her shoulder, down her arm. “Ut alas,” she says. “Their wings.”

These words are in her mouth, but other words—“when you can tell me, beekeeper”—are in her ears. She is alone, and these words are in her ears.

She pulls the now-waterlogged super from the creek. A side board has hit a rock, cracking the wood along its grain. She takes the super home, and she lets it dry. Then she removes the board, replaces it, rebuilds the box, repaints it. She takes care to keep the new paint out of the sun’s glare until she is certain it has cured.

Over time, her scratches and bruises heal.

She harvests the rest of the season’s honey alone, freighted with awareness that she is alone—except of course for the bees, who hum of golden industry, disdaining riddles and answers that hold answers… that hide answers.

The beekeeper is not bothered even by the orchardist, during neither the sad remainder of the season’s first honey harvest nor any of the fullness of its second—for the second, his absence would have been no surprise, for he would be preparing for his own harvest, testing for starch, pressure, acidity, ethylene. That last, the beekeeper knows, is the most important (she pays attention when the orchardist tells her things) because it is the ripening hormone, and once it surges, it is too late. Starch turns to sugar. The fruit senesces and spoils.

The orchardist cares for his crop, but his absence has an additional driver. He had shown up when the beekeeper was laboring to repair the super; she felt his presence behind her as she worked. His voice jumped at her as he said, “I’m in love with somebody.”

“Not me, I hope.”

“Not you,” he had begun to say. Then she stood up and turned around. He looked her up and down: few surfaces of her body had escaped the incident unscathed. “And double not you if you look like that. What happened?”

“I fell.”

“You’re a mess.”

“I fell a lot.”

“Do you need me to take you to the doctor? Or at least talk you into going?”

“No, all this is… superficial.”

“Do you need me to talk you into anything else?”

This, she considered. “Not right now. But you will, right? If I get too…”

“Too what?”

“I don’t know.” She looked down at the super that she had not quite made whole again. “But you’ll tell me, won’t you? Even now that you’re busy with being in love with somebody who thank god isn’t me?”

“Remember that time when we were kids and I—”

“Not a parable, please.”

“That time when we were kids,” he went on, unperturbed, “and I got stung by one of your bees?”

“They weren’t mine yet. They were my mother’s. And they aren’t really anybody’s anyway.”

“I’m pretty sure the one that stung me was yours. It was mad at me.”

“You were hitting her. Not just waving her away. You hit her.” The beekeeper couldn’t keep her voice from sharpening, despite the fact that this happened decades ago, couldn’t keep her body from turning away from him.

“She was on my neck… I was seven years old, and she was on my neck.”

She knelt again over the super, took up her hammer, drove the final nail home with sharp, necessary strikes. “And not hurting you: I told you that. But you hit her anyway.”

“I know. And then she stung me, and then you told me that she’d die because of stinging me. And then you punched me. I had a bee sting and a black eye, and you had two broken fingers.”

“Your black eye went away in a week. I had to wear a splint on my hand for over a month.” She stretched out the fingers of that hand. Once they had healed, they had looked no different from the fingers of her other hand.

“You learned to ride your bike one-handed, though.”

“I don’t think I needed to know how to do that.”

“You sure did need to know it that summer.”

The beekeeper looked up at him. “This is a parable about riding my bike one-handed?”

“C’mon, did you hit your head when you fell a lot? It’s about compensating when you get hurt.”

“What?”

“It’s _also_ about riding your bike one-handed. Which it turns out you were really good at.”

“Why did you have to start the parable with the bee sting then? Why not just say ‘remember that summer when your hand was in a splint’?” She swung the hammer again, moodily, even though no nailheads protruded. The half-moon indentation that now marred the new board displeased her.

“Because it’s also about _why_ you hurt yourself.”

“I would almost rather you tell me a joke.”

“Look, I’ve got an orchard, and you’ve got bees.”

“That’s the start of a joke?”

“No. Or maybe eventually. But right now: we need each other.”

She would have liked to hammer again… to batter the whole fateful super to pieces and buy a new one. Start clean. She sighed and closed the box of nails instead. “Well. Technically, _they_ need each other. We’re incidental.”

“That’s not true. You’re fixing their sweet little house, right now.”

“I’m the one who broke it.”

“Help me out: you’re supposed to say, ‘yes, you’re right, we do need each other.’”

“I’ll say it, but I don’t think—”

“I do need you.” He sat down beside the super. “I need you to tell me: how do I tell her how I feel?”

A baffling request. “Her? This girl you’re in love with? You never had any trouble talking to girls before.”

“This is different. First, I never felt like this before. I saw her—she was there in the orchard—and she was part of it. Like, I thought the trees and the fruit and my family and you and even your bees were everything that _really_ mattered. But there she was, and I knew she was _part_ of it. I’m not making sense.”

“Surprisingly, you are.” She sat down next to him. “But I don’t see the _problem_.”

“Her family’s migrants.”

“I can’t believe you’d care about that.”

“You _must’ve_ hit your head.” He reached over and pushed at her temple with his knuckles. “Listen: I have to care. Because think about what’s happened to her family in orchards. How they treated her, and her family, and all the families like them. With all of that, how can I tell her anything?”

The beekeeper snorted. “I’m the last person you should be asking.”

“But you’re the first person—the only person—I’m asking. So answer me. How can I tell her?”

“How can you tell her?” the beekeeper echoed. “I think it’s probably not a matter of how. It’s whether. Whether you can tell her. And if you can… then you do. You tell her. Tell her, and be better.”

“But what happens if it doesn’t work?”

“Then we’ll live out our days just like this.”

She watched his face struggle to smile as he usually did. It didn’t work, but she knew he should smile. She asked, “Why did the orchardist cross the road?”

“Yeah?” He leaned back a little and crossed his arms. “This is gonna be good.”

“It really isn’t, but okay: to get to… the other cider.”

He didn’t laugh. He leaned forward, squinting at her. He said, “Seriously, do I need to take you to a doctor?”

“I’m trying something new.”

“Yeah. I guess I am too.” He smiled, and she smiled. Then he said, “Living out our days just like this… it wouldn’t be the worst.”

“It wouldn’t,” she agreed. “But tell her.”

“And be better. I will.”

He did. He was. He was, and he is. And so the beekeeper harvests alone.

In what seems no time at all—the first flurries of snow have yet to prick the air—the orchardist and the woman he loves are married. They are married in the orchard, among the now-bare trees, and in the fullness of summer, the happy couple announce to their guests, there will be a baby. The entire town, from the city-born newcomers to those whose families have never known another home, witness the marriage.

The entire town, that is, but for the residents of the not-home in which the beekeeper’s father lives. Where his living is assisted, because he cannot accomplish it alone.

In his room of dusk that neither deepens nor lifts, the beekeeper asks her father, “Do you remember the orchardist? My friend?”

“An orchard…” he says. When he speaks, he still uses her father’s voice.

“He got married. Yesterday, in the orchard, he got married.”

“Married? Who got married? Did I?”

“You don’t remember?” she asks, though she knows it is cruel to ask.

“I don’t know.”

“You weren’t married in an orchard. You were married in a church. I have pictures, but you get upset when I show them to you. I think it’s that some part of you does remember… so you get upset because they make you sad, but you don’t know why you’re sad. You can’t remember why.”

“What can’t I remember?”

“You used to take me to that church, the one where you got married. You used to take me to church, in that church.”

“Take a stranger to church?”

“You’ve always been kind to strangers. You and my mother both: always kind to strangers.”

“Who’s your mother? Another stranger?” He moves his head, begins to shake it back and forth, and this is often a prelude to a lash of anger, so the beekeeper, in the absence of anything else to do, takes his hand.

She holds his hand until he quiets. This does not always work: as when she shows him pictures, something in him remembers that holding this hand once had meaning, and sometimes he cries. But today he calms.

She goes to the hives, and she sinks down, in the way she has done for death. She does not know who is dead, who is dying. “I miss her,” she tells the warm bodies that are the hives.

Most bees’ lives are short, but the queen’s life is long. Three workers’ lifetimes, four lifetimes, sometimes more. Being queen means watching through lifetimes as your drone suitor-brothers expire quickly, as your sisters work themselves to death… they all are replaced. As your reign lengthens, as the lifetimes pass, you may not cease from wondering: Are these your brothers or your sons? Your sisters or your daughters? In the hive, it is no matter; if a life is long, that is because it is long. Other lives are short because other lives are short.

What is the point of missing anyone? The beekeeper walks to her truck. Surely she can prove that there is no such point… but the air around her is cold, its molecules dense. They push against her; she cannot slip through them undetected. Unmarked.

The beekeeper reads the Bible instead, seeking riddles. She has made her way through to the Song of Solomon—found herself stirred by the Song of Solomon—by the time she is struck by the irony that she is performing the exact task that a moralist preacher might have recommended. Yet no moralist preacher would condone the religious hunger that drives this Bible study.

She finds no new riddle: but so the winter passes.

She had a year ago longed for spring and the familiar work it brought. Now the work is familiar, but it carries also a poised hope that hovers over every moment. But for what does she hope? She has no riddle and no answer. She has nothing new to tell.

The beekeeper may have nothing new to tell, but she does, in time, have something, or some things, new to consider: two girls, twin girls, the orchardist’s daughters. “Two!” he had bellowed to her one day in early spring, from the top of a ladder, surrounded by the vaguest beginnings of green. And in response to her confused query, he crowed, “Heartbeats!”

The beekeeper meets both girls soon after their birth—but before meeting them, she beholds them, as she and the orchardist stand outside a hospital room and gaze on the orchardist’s wife, asleep, with one small girl to her left and another small girl to her right. “Look at them,” he says. “Look at them, look at all three of them. I never thought I’d see anything more beautiful than the orchard, because what’s more beautiful than the orchard? But now I know.”

The beekeeper puts her arm around the orchardist’s once-stung neck and hugs him to her. Then she lets him go, so she can behold him as he beholds them, for that which lights his eyes: that is what is more beautiful than the orchard.

That night she reads Whitman again, more, hears in those words again, more, the whispering of smoke and honey. _You must habit yourself to the dazzle of the light and of every moment of your life_ , that smoked and honeyed voice whispers.

She feels again the drape of a sugar-weighted body on hers. Tastes a ghost in her mouth, a confection of nectar and sweat.

And as her own antiphon, she takes the orchardist’s words: “Now I know.”

In the morning, in the fresh light, she puts on her gear, and she goes to the hives.

Whole and clean they are. Solid and strong.

“Animalia,” she begins.

After completing her inspection of the first hive, she steps back. She says, as if continuing a conversation, “People think bees shouldn’t be able to fly.” She holds her body very still, but she darts her eyes, waiting for the trick, the flash.

No trick. No flash.

“Okay,” she says. “Now I know.”

“Oh, beekeeper,” she hears, and though she had tried to reckon what the sound of that phrasing after so long might do to her, still she did not expect her knees to give way. She did not expect to find herself on the ground, beholding through mesh this dazzle of dark and light.

“‘People think bees shouldn’t be able to fly.’ Again you speak of _should not_ ,” the dazzle chastises.

“No, no, listen: I’m not one of those people. I don’t think it. But the _idea_ that bees shouldn’t be able to fly, that when they fly, they violate the laws of physics—that it should be aerodynamically impossible, but they do anyway, people like that idea. They take it as a little parable about how the bees don’t know that we think they shouldn’t be able to do this, so they just go ahead and do it anyway. Honestly I like the orchardist’s parables better, but anyway, for decades, they believed it, because one scientist supposedly proved it. But he made bad assumptions about how the wings work, so he got it all wrong.” Her words are tumbling from her in desperate volubility, as if by their number she might make her case. She scrambles to her feet.

“How… unsound. This reasoning.” But her voice has a tentative cast. As it did when she asked of the end.

“I know. I know, I know. Because bees do fly, of course they fly, and of course it’s aerodynamically possible, because it happens. Because when things happen, aren’t you bound to accept that they happened? Instead of holding so tight to your own assumptions about everything?”

“Beekeeper,” the woman says, with severity, and the beekeeper braces for rebuke. Instead, “You are not quiet today. Why are you not quiet today?”

“I have things to tell you today.”

“ _More_ things?”

“More things, and you know it, or you wouldn’t be here. I know the answer now. I know the riddle, and I know the answer. I couldn’t figure out what the riddle was until I knew the answer.”

“And what is the answer? Tell me.”

“I saw it yesterday. I recognized it.” A twitch of reluctance, though, one defensive flicker: “So maybe it’s about the orchardist more than me.”

“Oh, beekeeper.” Pitying or indulgent? She goes on, “Do not dismiss it. Let us begin at the beginning. The first riddle. Tell me.”

“Out of the eater, something to eat. Out of the strong, something sweet.”

“And the answer. Tell me.”

“‘What is stronger than a lion? What is sweeter than honey?’ That’s the answer to the first riddle, and it’s also the second riddle. Isn’t it. That’s the second riddle.”

The woman smiles. “And now the answer to this second riddle, this answer you have found in this answer. Tell me. The answer to all things is in this answer: ‘What is stronger than a lion? What is sweeter than honey?’ Tell me.”

The beekeeper removes her veil; the sun is brighter than she knew. “A kelson of the creation is…” She lingers on the not-quite answer.

“Tell me.”

And again she delays: “Many waters cannot quench…”

“Tell me, beekeeper.” The command is threaded with exquisite vexation.

“Fill in the blank, stranger.” The beekeeper has not teased her catechist before, not like this, but she has not known herself happy before, either. The defensive spasm: it is gone. The “tell me” she hears, over and over, and over and over at last she tells, and there into one do love and love combine.

****

One of the orchardist’s daughters grows to spend her days among the trees with her father and her mother, but her sister… her sister finds her way to the beekeeper’s hives when she is eight years old. The beekeeper, hard at work, hears a noise through the copse before she sees anyone, but that noise resolves quickly and easily enough into the jangle of a bicycle chain. The beekeeper regards the orchardist’s daughter; the orchardist’s daughter regards the beekeeper… but more closely, the orchardist’s daughter regards the bees. “We’ll have to get you a veil,” the beekeeper says.

Just as the beekeeper’s mother had instructed her, she in turn teaches the orchardist’s daughter to tell the bees. “Tell them what?” his daughter asks.

In the days that follow, the beekeeper listens, just as the bees do now, just as they and her mother had then, to tellings of the orchard, of its blooms, of the family that tends it.

She teaches the orchardist’s daughter to tell, but also to look, to listen. To keep.

“Did you see something?” the orchardist’s daughter asks, one afternoon as the sun turns and slants in the way that makes blossoms burn and white hives’ sharp edges quaver against the rays. “Somebody? Back by the hives?”

The beekeeper shakes her head. “A trick of the light.”

In her ear, later: “A trick of the light, my beekeeper?” Dusted with a tsk-tsk.

“Do you think that slights you? The dazzle of the light, then. And of every moment of my life.” This is not reverence. It is a fact.

“Of what such moments will you tell me now?”

“I’ll ask you something instead: why did the bee cross the road?”

“Tell me, beekeeper.” A hint of a smile.

“To get in the chicken’s business about what was going on over there, probably.”

“That ‘why’ does not seem notably revelatory.” The tsk-tsk is back, but it is dry.

“Then maybe you should tell me. Why did the bee cross the road?”

“To re-…” A pause. The raise of an eyebrow. “…-side.”

The beekeeper blinks.

The dark woman crosses her arms at the beekeeper in satisfaction. Her garments disarrange, float, resettle. Then she says, “Really, beekeeper, if all you intend to do is gape, perhaps I should stay neither here nor on any previous side I may have occupied. Perhaps I should leave you to your disbelief.”

Disbelief? The beekeeper is from time to time introspective: she ponders light and dark, strong and sweet. She could turn her now-accustomed eyes away, and one day she may. What happens one day will happen on that day. But on this day? “Did I say ‘the end’?”

A sly honey-house smile accompanies the responsory: “You did not.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> original part 7 tumblr tags: don't think I'm not as surprised as you, to find that it all comes down to an England Dan and John Ford Coley song, (Todd Rundgren wrote it but I don't think that improves the situation much from a philosophical standpoint), but then again, as yet another philosopher reminds us, you can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you just might find, you get what you need, I'll also throw in a little eis tous aionas ton aionon, because this is my self-indulgent thing, also one more couplet from Whitman to go out on: 'This hour I tell things in confidence / I might not tell everybody, but I will tell you.'


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